Designing for All: Accessibility Thinking as a Usability Lever
Technology enables millions of people to remain productive despite their reduced abilities, and technical progress will continue to provide additional benefits with innovations for those with vision, hearing, and motor skills impairments. We can expect those innovations to include smart glasses that provide missing information for the visually impaired and automatically generated sign language for the hearing impaired. Wheelchairs that understand our movement might even create a new category, as their new technology greatly expands their features, allowing them to do much more than traditional wheelchairs.
For technology to be effective, however, we must properly apply it. We use technology to communicate every day, and thankfully, there are many ways to improve the accessibility of our communications. For instance, by simply making small changes to the size of text and images. Furthermore, those improvements often bring greater usability for all users. If you already think inclusively, about all users, when communicating, thank you! You have integrated accessibility thinking into your communications. If not, no worries. This article presents a few simple tips for using accessibility thinking as a usability lever.
Presentations for All
Many of us regularly make presentations to crowds large or small, where we need to communicate important points to educate, persuade, and/or entertain. There are a lot of courses available on creating powerful messages, but few of them tackle the issue of truly reaching everybody, regardless of the audience’s ability to perceive.
Next time you are making a presentation to a large crowd, make note of how many people in the room are wearing glasses. Then consider that many of the others are wearing contact lenses. Together, the two groups represent the number of people who would need you to change your presentation if it were not for their vision correction. That number is probably larger than most of us think, and that’s not all.
You may also have some people in the audience for whom no level of vision correction will allow them to see the details of your presentation. Instead, they rely on what you say. On the flip side, others rely entirely on your presentation visuals because they have a hard time hearing you, or don’t hear anything at all.
If the crowd is large enough to be considered a representative sample of the US population, 8% of the audience have visual impairment, 16% have some difficulties with physical function, 15% of the ones aged 18 and over have some form of hearing loss, and between 5% and 10% have communication disorders. In all, 1 in 4, or 25% of Americans, live with some form of disability. To put that number into perspective, it is a population of about 90 million people, or about twice the population of California. Across the world, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 1.3 billion people — or 16% of the global population — experience significant disability.
It is no surprise therefore that most respectable software companies today employ a “Director of Accessibility” in the senior ranks and devote considerable resources to ensuring that their software products pass accessibility testing. However, accessibility design, development, and testing, is not just good for computer users who fall under a legal definition of disabled. It is often beneficial for a much larger crowd. Yes, the other 75% or so of the population could also benefit from more accessible designs.
Accessibility Thinking
When I joined SAS ABLE –The All Abilities Network at SAS in 2022, I began promoting an expanded accessibility design idea that I refer to as “accessibility thinking”, where we consider a much larger group as the target users of accessible designs than just those normally falling under the criteria of disabled. My motivation was that usability metrics generally improve when products are designed with accessibility thinking. Ideally, this practice would also result in greater emphasis on accessibility in product development in general, with benefits for all users.
A Spectrum of Abilities
Instead of thinking about users as disabled or not disabled, think about the abilities of users as a spectrum. In fact, that is how abilities are. We change as we age and so do our abilities — slowly but surely. At some point, we begin to accommodate, and we don’t need to wait until we cross some legal threshold of disability before we begin using convenient software features to accommodate our changing abilities.
In late 2019, I personally began using a few accessibility features, and when Covid arrived a few months later, I was quite comfortable using the Apple Magic Mouse for split-second touch zooming to enjoy better access to content in remote meetings than my colleagues.
Often when presenters in Teams meetings apologized for the small font or the hard-to-see images in their content, my colleagues in those meetings replied with details regarding how much they could, or could not see, and the presenter tried to accommodate. At the same time, I was already comfortably reading the presentation content — thanks to a standard accessibility feature in Mac OS — even though most of those colleagues have better vision than I do.
The general usefulness of such features justifies considering accessibility as a core design principle, and to design for a spectrum of abilities, resulting in a human interface that can be adjusted to meet the needs of each person, regardless of their abilities or disabilities.
While I have referred to this approach as accessibility thinking, other similar definitions exist. Marcelo Calbucci defines accessibility thinking:”…as the act of minimizing access friction to the audience you are targeting for them to use the product as it was intended.” Access, in this case, refers to their ability to discover and use the product. This is a nice general way to define. For you to get into accessibility thinking, however, you may want more specifics and even examples.
Induced Disability & Accessibility
That feature I have been relying on the most to view any content during Teams meetings in recent years was specifically designed for accessibility on Macs. The zoom feature is available within the accessibility settings and is easy to enable. Most users, however, may not discover this option because they don’t think of accessibility as something they need.
However, in the age of Teams, Zoom, Facetime, and other remote work tools, we could all benefit from using that same accessibility feature. Even my 16-year-old daughter, with her 20/20 vision, makes good use of it on a regular basis. Whether in an online meeting or reviewing a web page or a document, she quickly presses the CTRL key and slides her finger on the Magic Mouse. In an instant, she changes the situation in her favor. In other words, this one feature is beneficial to users far beyond the 8% of the population who have visual impairments.
Many of us occasionally run into situational disability — instances when even full abilities are insufficient within a certain context. Disability is then not the result of our own impaired abilities, but the combination of our abilities and the design placed before us. In other words, as a designer, if I don’t do my job properly, I can induce disability in my user population. A bad design can make any user unproductive, powerless, and uncomfortable. By the same token, a good design can do the opposite, and not just for a few users. It can make ALL users feel enabled and empowered.
Universal Appeal
The software industry now has excellent training for designers and software development teams to learn to create accessible products. With a simple upgrade to our thinking to account for a continuous spectrum of abilities, and to think of overall accessibility, we can supercharge our designs and achieve a truly universal appeal.
One of the most widely used communication methods during online business meetings is the slide deck. That use case is therefore a good starting point for accessibility thinking and to promote universal appeal. Everybody, techies and non-techies alike, could benefit from learning how to present their content in all their remote meetings in a more accessible way. Let’s begin the practice of “accessibility thinking” with some simple suggestions for your next presentation.
Unused Space, Unused (voice) Words
One of the most common problems is the tendency to write too many words on slides using a small typeface. Rest assured that an increase in text size will not only make a slide more accessible to those with visual impairment but will also make it more convenient for everyone else.
If you are one of those great presentation slide authors who always present very accessible slides: Thank you! Please help others get there as well.
For some examples of presentation slides that could use an accessibility boost, consider the readability of the slides in the image below, obtained from a “ppt slide examples” Google search. Think about how the design of each slide works for all users. The point here is not to try to read these slides. I made the text fuzzy so that you focus on the structure, arrangement and overall design and get a general sense of the use of words and images, the size of it all, and specifically the use of real estate.
At first glance, you may find the examples quite acceptable. They do look like many slides we all see regularly., but with a few small adjustments, we can make this content more accessible and still retain any appeal the aesthetic design may have:
· Tip # 1: Look at the available real estate on each slide. Pictures and text aside, how much empty space is there? Do you have a lot of space that could easily be used to improve access to your content? And all without sacrificing slide design!
· Tip # 2: When you are writing the text on your slides, if you choose your words carefully, you can still achieve a good slide design as you craft a powerful message. Journalists do that with headlines, using few words to make a point, and so can you with your slide text.
· Tip # 3: Consider how the combination of what you show and what you say constructs your overall message. Are those two parts only complementary or can they each carry the message reasonably well?
Try measuring the reaction of a walkthrough of your slides with the text blocked. Then reveal the text, and finally, add your voice. Try putting yourself in the shoes of those who either cannot hear what you say, or cannot see the content you present, and think about the message that comes across in each case.
Note: I know that some courses on presentation design emphasize using complimentary images and text. I think it's time to edit those courses and make room for inclusive presentation design.
· Tip # 4: If you are going to share the slide deck, place extra information about the content on each slide into the notes of the slides.
These suggestions are very simple, but then you will always improve access for some members of your audience by just making things a little larger, using more of that unused slide real estate. Moreover, it can be done in a beautiful and creative way.
I recently attended a conference where one presenter had extremely large text on all his slides. The surprising thing was not the accessibility, but rather the mixture of accessibility and beauty. The presenter managed to combine background imagery and carefully selected foreground text into a single, beautiful design. The text on each slide, although brief, gave you the slide's main point, and it was written using a nice and crisp typeface. The result was a very accessible presentation. My location in the middle of the auditorium allowed me to have good access to this presenter's content. The author graciously shared his slides with me, revealing that he has followed all four suggestions above (and without knowing about the content of this article). The notes in the PowerPoint slide deck include statements he made on stage. The text on the slide below (English translation: "We write human history.") was his final point.
It may be useful to think about some scenarios of visual ability and distances more specifically to appreciate what Andri's slides accompliahed.
If you look at one of your presentations 10 feet from the stage or projector screen, and can just about see what it says, somebody else may need to be only 2 feet away to see it, and even then, that person’s vision is twice as good as somebody who is at the threshold of legal blindness. To accommodate that second person, step back another 10 feet and then check the legibility of your slides. If you can make your slides legible for you at that distance, then your presentation just about works for somebody at the threshold of legal blindness.
Now you are engaging in accessibility thinking!
The next time you are responsible for a piece of content that will be shown to a large crowd, whether it is a slide presentation, a web page, a flyer, a sign, a banner, or something else, consider practicing accessibility thinking — enabling access for all to discover and use the material you are presenting — by applying accessibility design as a usability lever to increase the overall usability of your content.
